System developers typically train question answer systems by ingesting corpora from trusted, traditional sources (textbooks, journals) that include accurate information. At times, a system developer may train a question answer system to a specific domain to increase the question answer system's accuracy (e.g., financial domain, travel domain, etc.).
Once the question answer system is trained, the question answer system receives questions and performs queries on the trained domain using queries such as Span Near queries, or “spannear” queries. Spannear queries search for two words in a domain that appear close to each other. For example, if searching for “Who is the president of Company ABC?” the question answer system may generate “spannear(president,of) and spannear(of, Company ABC)” to search a business domain. The question answer system, in turn, may rank candidate answers based upon the proximity of the matched words within a sentence. For example, the sentence “John Doe is president of Company ABC” may rank higher than the sentence “John Doe replaced Sally Smith in 2010 as president of Company ABC.”